Congress considers crooked charities

Congress is organizing a crackdown on charities and I like the rhetoric very much:

...examples of abuse surrounding charitable organizations are growing at an alarming rate...

These actions are immoral and inexcusable...

...a cesspool in many cases.

Unfortunately, it looks like the charities focus means that certain Civil War nonprofits are going to escape the tightening of legislative controls.

I was a little sad at first, until I considered that new laws are not going to make the corrupt managers any more ethical; nor are they going to cause decadent boards of directors to replace cronies.

The rotten will simply be compliant or not - they are not going to improve as people or as stewards of institutions.

So when we look into the finances of our favorite Civil War organizations and we see, for instance, a black curtain drawn over the details of individual battlefield land transactions, we are denied the precise information we sought but are granted all we need to know about the management in question. And Congress had nothing to do with it.

Congress is never going to save lazy, distracted donors from giving money to corrupt nonprofits inside or outside the ACW sphere. The fact that donations roll into these groups at all is the only part of this to be sad about.